


Trencil Varnia in Love, Forevers, and the Care of Things Much Too Small

by Rhidee



Category: Smile For Me (Video Game)
Genre: Flowers, Genderfluid Trencil, Historical, Light Angst, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 06:54:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19223923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhidee/pseuds/Rhidee
Summary: Trencil has been around a very long time, but he always finds something worth being there for.





	Trencil Varnia in Love, Forevers, and the Care of Things Much Too Small

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PanDisasterMan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PanDisasterMan/gifts).



His first love gave him a silphium.  Trencil remembered how he had flushed and blabbered when it was placed in his hands, preserved oh so delicately between folded papyrus, still retaining startling detail and beauty.  That afternoon they had kissed as if the sky was falling, as if the very universe itself was going to shift and change around their hopes and dreams. 

In the night, flushed with love and mirth, his love told him of all he knew of the plant.  He had to travel quite a way along the coast, with the scent of the sea as constant as the Romans who claimed the area.  He had a few seeds, ones that nobody had been able to grow, and love drunk he told Trencil that if the flowers would bloom for anything it would be him.

Trencil had sat, tracing the weave of the flax blanket, his nails occasionally snagging, and thought about forevers.

 

-

 

By his 26th and 27th loves, life was no longer forever’s.  Everything was temporary, heartfelt grasps at the futility of time.  She held them close, their lives sparking like colors behind eyes squeezed shut.  Everything was shifting, flowing with time.  By this point Trencil had found the world larger and more complex than she had ever grasped in her boyhood.  There were no words for what she was, her now constant shifting of pronouns across the worlds many languages just felt as comfortable as the sun itself, constant but ever-changing. 

Trencil admired his loves, admiring the spaces where they all clicked together, where man and woman and something else met not as forms, but as thoughts and feelings and a love so spiritual that bone deep wasn’t deep enough.  As the snow piled up outside, she thought of domestic things.  Of collecting new logs to expand the house, making space for the artists interest she had come to love from her dearests.  Of careful crafting of art supplies, a luxury and a gift all in one, and of bodies pressed close to the quiet sounds of an idea becoming a sight. 

By the end of winter it was only him, sitting and staring at the suns thawing light.  It shook the cold from the trees, revealed food not seen in the winter.  Trencil's glazed eyes followed the shrinking shadow coming to his doorstep.  Then he took his bag, packed long ago, and went. 

Behind him, a bed with two bloodless bodies, snuggled close and in love.  Trencil found he rather hated the cold, without someone near. 

As he went from settlement to settlement, searching for new memories with the determination of a man looking to forget, words reached him of riots in Shelburne.  It seemed that things were heating up in this part of the world, and he had long grown tired of seeing pained conflict and a thousand lives he could not save.  He adjusted his goals.

 

-

 

A stilt house sitting a half days trip from the nearest community wasn’t where Trencil wanted to settle.  The woman who had lived there had taken one look at him, declared him a spirit, and promptly handed him a toddler. 

She coughed, making vague statements about Jesus and illness and the child, named Neide, and then left for town in a whirl.  Trencil looked at Neide, her sharp face blinking without alarm.  She was light, no more than one arroba.  Her brightly colored outfit swished as she slid down and began to play with some pottery.  Trencil looked at her and thought about raising a child.

He was promptly terrified.

 

-

 

It took only a few days for Neide’s mother to come back, but they were a very long few days.  Neide played in the dirt as Trencil watched, the sweet smell of the rosewood trees swaying up into the air.  He closed his eyes, listening carefully as the cool shade soothed his stress. 

Trencil felt a tap on his knee and looked down at the child.  She handed him a flower, red with a shape like a broad petaled star. 

It was beautiful, something yet to have a name, given freedom from it’s lack of definition.  He smiled softly, tucked it behind her ear, and tapped her nose lightly.  Neide’s nose scrunched, and she stuck her tongue out before going back to her play. 

Trencil covered his smile with his hand, and later that day if he carefully took the flower to keep, that was just something for his own knowledge.

 

-

 

When he left, the mother looking less ill and Neide disappointed, he carefully placed a wooden necklace, pendant carved carefully from oak, into Neide’s hands. 

He didn’t look back, but as with all things, he left a bit of himself anyway.

 

-

 

Flowers are a glorious thing.   They bloom so briefly, but so brilliantly.  They are simple things; they only need three things to be right to survive.  But with care, and patience, they can really bloom.

Tucked into Trencil’s coat pocket is a worn journal, thrice remade.  There are quite a few flowers inside, not all of them still around.  A packet to hold seeds lies against the cover, full of seeds he’s tried again and again to grow.  To see the sights, the smells, of something lost.

There’s notes, too.  Newspaper entries, a few scattered diary notes.  A message, five pages long, addressed to his lovely daughter, for when one day she gets the journal.  The thing about forevers is when its shared, there’s always an ending. 

A termlist is in there too, a series of words, queer words, from the Americans.  It sits smugly an embarrassing photo of his punk rock phase.  The leather is a big much, but his smile is true.  His skirt sways where his eyes stare.  Next to him, lighting a Molotov cocktail, is his 97th love.  Nat’s mother.

Flowers are wonderous things.  You can see them every day, and yet they never look the same.  You can see every species, and new will be made.  Every flower brings joy.  You can’t pick one flower and have it last forever, but by god, you can enjoy it while it lasts.

And while Trencil looks at his young daughter, nine years old and getting spunky, he thinks about forevers one last time.

**Author's Note:**

> Flowers:  
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium  
> This flower goes extinct shortly after due to Roman overfarming 
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattleya_coccinea
> 
> Okay, originally this was going to be Trencil being gay throughout history, but then this happened? I also had a list of plants that went extinct and where, and was going to play into a lot of him somehow managing to get a record of them right before they went extinct. But turns out the thing about plants that went extinct in the 1700s and earlier is that....theres not a record of them much at all asfdoihfsd. I also skipped the 1920s part I wanted to get into (the cry violet) because it's 4am.
> 
> How old is Trencil? You may ask.  
> He's yes years old. As far as i'm concerned he's punched a dinosaur.
> 
> Edit:.   
> Where is he?  
> Egypt, last century bc  
> Canada, 1780   
> Brazil, 1790
> 
> For the last scene he's vaguely in the same area as the habitat will be, about 5 or 6 years before it opens.


End file.
